How Ainsworth’s dream job turned into his, and our, worst nightmare – Column Sunday, 29th Oct 2023 23:06 by Clive Whittingham After 28 matches in charge and only five wins, Gareth Ainsworth has been removed from the job he craved for ten years after six straight defeats. The cheese slice momentIn 2017 a group of the worst type of people in modern society found themselves hilariously stranded at an airport in the Caribbean, without food or water, their money stolen, and no way of getting home to the US. They had thought they were flying in to attend a music festival, Fyre, run by notorious conman Billy McFarlane and well known gobshite Ja Rule (actual name Jeffrey). Evidence this festival was actually ever going to take place was pretty thin on the ground. It had already been shifted from its original location after a row with the island’s owner, which offered none of the logistics like electricity and plumbing you’d require to host 10,000 drugged up rich kids in any case, and planted, at extremely short notice, on a concrete bluff of the side of Great Exuma. What accommodation there was came in the form of emergency tents left over from Hurricane Matthew, and even they only lasted as long as it took the first thunderstorm to render them entirely unusable. Neither the party goers, nor the bands, received details of where they were going, where they’d be staying, how they’d be getting there, and yet still they funnelled thousands and thousands of dollars into ticket, travel and accommodation packages. When, a fortnight out from due date, the festival got in touch telling them the event would be cashless, and they’d have to pay for everything with a wristband onto which they advised loading $5,000 or more for the weekend, you’d think an alarm bell or two might have sounded. Instead, they collectively transferred over $800,000. They did so because influencers told them to. The whole thing was a mirage and illusion built by harnessing the power famous people yield over their gormless, gawping followers. I mean, sure, this thing sounds a little fishy to me, but Bella Hadid (60.6m Instagram followers) and Emily Ratajkowski (30.3m) says Major Lazer are going to be there so here’s my bank card, ATM code and key to my flat. When it came to them finally throwing open the gates, and revealing the truth of the matter, the festival goers turned on each other, hoarding bedding and toilet rolls for themselves while actively trashing tents and beds in the immediate vicinity so nobody else could have them. A New York Times deep dive followed, examining everything from the intricate financial details of how the fraud was perpetuated, to what it said about American society, the willingness of the masses to dote and hang on the every word of YouTube and Instagram nobodies, whose sole achievement and talent in life is growing a decent pair of tits, and what responsibility these twats have when wielding that power for their own commercial gain. What they didn’t talk about, and was subsequently addressed in the following Netflix documentary, was The Cheese Sandwich moment. One post, by one festival goer, of the slice of American cheese and piece of stale bread he’d been presented with in a polystyrene box by way of “five star catering from restaurateur Stephen Starr” which went viral around the world and holed the show below the waterline once and for all. Powerful models posting orange tiles built the festival, one kid with 400 followers ripped it down with a pic of some cheese. You’ll all have your own outstanding moment of doom from the gloom of Gareth Ainsworth’s reign, which will unfortunately and sadly now go down as one of the worst in the club’s history – five wins from 28 matches is a win percentage of just under 18% and only five in our history have done worse (Neil Critchley, one from 13, 8.33%; Gary Waddock, four from 23, 17.4%; Ray Harford, five from 41, 12.2%; Steve Burtenshaw, six from 41, 14.6%; Bill Dodgin, two from 16, 12.5%). There have certainly been plenty to choose from. This team has clocked up four home defeats and 13 goals conceded just to Coventry and Blackburn on his watch, culminating in the shameful fourth goal Rovers were waved through for at Loftus Road last week. We’ve already lost 4-0 twice this season, and on both occasions the score could have been up to twice as bad had the opponent not started pissing about once the game was won – in the case of Watford that constituted the entire second half. Supping a pint in the sun among the stony-faced and completely silent QPR substitutes while the Slavia Prague fans around us laughed and took the piss out of our repeated attempts to rescue a 3-0 pre-season friendly defeat by belting the ball at Hamzad Kargbo, stands out. Watching Liam Manning, who we decided against appointing here last summer after Mick Beale had wowed us with his chuffing PowerPoint presentation, systematically take us apart with his new Oxford side, is up there. The way we set up at Leeds, with the entire gameplan based around punting channel balls for Sinclair Armstrong to chase, and then, when the Irishman finally got hold of one, him being forced to have a shot from the corner flag because the nearest team mate was 80 yards away. The disintegration of Ilias Chair and Chris Willock, one of the most exciting combinations in the league this time last year. The ever mounting passing stats: Tim Iroegbunam, one pass in 67 minutes success rate 0% at Burnley; Andre Dozzell, eight passes in 71 minutes against West Brom in a game where Kyle Bartley and Cedric Kipre completed 164 between them; Sam Field giving the ball away 40% of the time he had it in that same game. The shameless felating of Leon Balogun, Asmir Begovic and others. The team selections, the tactics, the style, the approach, and the absolute ease at which people like Mark Robins and Jon Dahl Tomasson have been able to dismantle all of it. The flailing, rambling, gaslighting interviews: “I believe we can achieve this season, and when I say achieve I mean achieve more than people think we can achieve, and that would be a hell of an achievement”. Personally, my cheese slice moment came at Leeds. What was supposed to be a nice half day off work sipping Peroni on the train turned, via strike and storm, into an eight-hour ordeal on the M1 that, at one point, looked like it might threaten us making the game at all. It was wet, it was windy, and Leeds charged us £45 to get in. We stood, in one of this league’s worst away ends, stewarded by gibbons who wanted the couple of hundred Rangers in attendance to stick to their allocated seats, surrounded on all sides (and, in their wisdom, now also the lower tier of the away end), by meatheads. We went one down early, we showed zero ambition to even keep the ball and cross the halfway line, let alone score a goal, and we more than contributed to a dirge so unwatchable even the usually exuberant home fans had long since drifted away into silence and early trips home despite their lead and eventual victory. Half an hour before the end QPR got a throw in right in front of us. In a game in which Kenneth Paal was twice penalised for a foul throw, Rangers left it to Albert Adomah to try, and spectacularly fail, to reach the penalty area with a long throw he does not possess. It looked like Mr Burns trying to cob a bowling ball, distance to be measured in inches rather than feet. A long throw is something footballers either have, or do not have. It’s not a skill you can imbue a player with simply through wishful thinking. You cannot make it true, simply by willing it to be so. And yet, time and time and time again, in this game and others, QPR trundled a couple of centre backs up the pitch into the penalty box to prepare for a long throw none of our players possess, all colluding in the illusion it's got a snowball's chance in hell of reaching the heart of the penalty box. If it was a ploy to trick teams into dropping deep, for us to throw short and then cross into a packed penalty area, then I’d understand, but it never was. They genuinely follow through with it. And we have to stand there, surrounded by 30,000 guffawing Leeds fans, profoundly embarrassed by our own side. The football, when all said and done, has been medieval. Culture clubThere was some logic to the Gareth Ainsworth appointment. QPR had, for several years, allegedly been pursuing the path of becoming a development club that would trade its way back up the league by bringing through academy graduates and well-scouted, data-driven bargain buys who can be sold for profit to reinvest. Progressive, development-type coaches were hired as manager to facilitate this – Steve McClaren, Mark Warburton, Mick Beale and Neil Critchley. This policy, by March last year, was widely perceived to have failed. Fingers can be pointed at the academy and its myriad coaches for failing to bring through first team standard players: critics would say through their own shortcomings, the staff would blame the incidious EPPP regulations that had seen the best part of a dozen potential gems ripped away from us for a total fee of only £700k. At the recruitment team, for whom a number of punts like Andre Dozzell and Rob Dickie have failed to yield the sellable assets they’d hoped for. At the board and Lee Hoos who, when they did have a team that was playing well and attracting some interest for the likes of Chris Willock, Ilias Chair and Dickie, outwardly stated they’d be selling nobody, and clubs shouldn’t even try, because they were pushing for promotion by adding in a load of expensive, ageing Johansen, Austin and Gray types to the mix – exactly the opposite of what the plan was supposed to be, exactly the opposite of what they’d all promised they’d do if in that situation again. And at the general circumstances of football in this country after Covid-19, with the market for mid-range Championship transfers of £3m-£8m, into which you’d place every asset we’ve had bar Eze, collapsing completely at the worst possible time for QPR. Whether we’re any good at it or not (we’re not) there was a feeling that this was a model for a different, pre-pandemic time and sport. What it had left us with was a squad of players who were mostly here for themselves as a career stepping stone, and really weren’t that bothered about QPR at all now that promise was not going to materialise. What we needed was a team that was here to play for QPR first and foremost, with some pride and some backbone, not one prone to crying off with injury and focusing on its next summer move as soon as the going got tough. It was also clear, having spent the money we did in the summer of 2021, and with the Ebere Eze sale rolling out of our three-year FFP calculations this year, money would be tight, and the major surgery required on a team weak in every area of the pitch would need to be done on a shoestring budget. All of this could reasonably be said to point to Gareth Ainsworth as a candidate, even without his QPR connections. He had a ten-year record at Wycombe of consistently achieving more than he should have been able to with the budget at his disposal, putting together exactly the sort more-than-the-sum-of-its-parts team QPR would need in 23/24. He, and his erudite assistant Richard Dobson, also prided themselves on their innovation in the fields of sports psychology, and the mental health side of the game, helping them eek extra returns from players others had failed to do. They hung their hat on the dressing room culture at Adams Park, and the players who guarded it for them. Again, with QPR tanking to an eventual run of two from 28, and players apparently downing tools and sulking following Mick Beale’s defection, this sort of thing figured very high on a lot of the shopping lists in W12.
There were, however, plenty of warning signs. It was, in many ways, QPR doing QPR things again. Things they’ve done repeatedly under this ownership with a decade of decline the result. It was, not for the first time, one of the majority shareholders taking the keys off the people driving the car day to day and enforcing a decision on them they would never have reached themselves – Amit Bhatia this time, by all accounts, in exactly the same way Ian Holloway had been parachuted in on Les Ferdinand and Lee Hoos, and then Steve McClaren after him because Tony Fernandes needed to “scratch that itch”. QPR desperately need a director of football to operate between these owners and the team, but you cannot have that model and then still have the owners swooping in every now and again foisting a whim on them. These whims often involve crowd and social media-pleasing populist moves. Ainsworth follows in the footsteps of Lee Cook, Jamie Mackie, and Ian Holloway as people who were brought back to great nostalgic acclaim in flawed moves (and, yes, I was in absolute raptures at a couple of those at the time, because I’m a nostalgic idiot too). When Les and the recruitment team had wanted Glenn Murray as their 2021 stop-gap, Fernandes pleased the masses with Charlie Austin instead and, while that went brilliantly to start with, the contract we subsequently gave him and the shape he came back in for 2021/22 is a part of the reason we’re in this state now. Whenever QPR make a move like this, ask yourself if any other club in the Championship would be making this appointment or signing at this point. Would any other Championship club have appointed Ian Holloway and Marc Bircham when we did? Would any of them have offered two years to Charlie Austin at that stage of his career? Gareth Ainsworth had previously been half-heartedly linked with Reading and Preston, but despite his achievements at Wycombe had never been offered the opportunity to step up. Had he not played with such distinction for QPR, would he have been on the radar? The reason for that is the style of play his Wycombe team used: ruthlessly, relentlessly long ball; aggression and physicality over style and finesse; dark arts, constantly getting the play stopped with head injuries, shameless time wasting. Wycombe tried every trick in the book. Hogan Ephraim found it so bleak when he went there he retired aged 29 to come and play Monday Night Football in Paradise Park against idiots like me. If you’re trying to develop players, if you want to progress in the modern game, if you want to be an attractive destination for signings, there’s not many clubs doing it this way. QPR knew it as well. Our relationship with Gareth, and his desperation to have a crack at the job, meant we could have appointed him at any moment we wanted after Ramsey, Hasselbaink, Holloway, McClaren, Warburton or Beale, and we pointedly refused. One exec even said to us in conversation “and that’s why you don’t appoint Gareth Ainsworth” when explaining the vision for the club. They all knew, and then appointed him anyway. It basically made Ferdinand’s position untenable and he resigned in the summer. They’ve since steadfastly insisted this was some magnanimous move because he “didn’t want to bring negativity” to the new season, but with a new manager and his extreme style foisted upon him, QPR doubling down on ‘what manager wants manager gets’, and Gareth targeting the sort of signings we've subsequently made here, he couldn’t possibly stay. That never works at QPR under this ownership, as we saw with Hughes and Redknapp, and although Ainsworth has, thankfully, been overruled on several things, such as the permanent signings of Dominic Gape (now with Sutton) and Chris Martin (Bristol Rovers), we have once again largely gone back to being The Manager FC. Only at QPR could you look at the mess caused by letting Mick Beale have his head last summer, and decide the best way to fix that is by letting Gareth Ainsworth have his next.
Whatever you think of McClaren, Warburton, Beale and/or Neil Critchley, and however they did, that is at least a coherent lineage of coaching appointments, not requiring the ripping up of the squad in the next transfer window, nor lumping together a load of players and coaches entirely unsuited to each other’s style and philosophy. Going from Critchley to Ainsworth was back to the bad old days of bouncing from managers as disparate in style and management as Mark Hughes to Harry Redknapp to Chris Ramsey to Jimmy Floyd Hasslebaink to Ian Holloway to Steve McClaren. You can’t do this. Any of this. We learned that the hard way. Or, at least, we bloody should have done. Ainsworth was keen to distance himself from the style he’d used at Wycombe. He defended it to a certain extent, saying that by the time he left Wanderers were scoring some of the most aesthetically pleasing goals in League One, and pointing to people like Bristol City buy Anis Mehmeti. But, he promised, it was a horse for a course. A style driven by budget restrictions, and the unique presence of Bayo Akinfenwa in attack. Given the bigger budgets in the Championship, he swore, it would be different. We asked him in the summer if he knew what he’d do if he ever did have money to spend and he immediately said, “flare players”. To be fair to him, whenever he did try and open this QPR team up, it got destroyed. Finally safe with one game of 22/23 to go, he said he wanted the team to put on a bit of a show for the Loftus Road crowd in the final home game against Bristol City (albeit while picking all the same old soaks who’d let us down all season and offering not one chance anywhere to one of the younger players in the squad) and got beaten easily 2-0. “They can’t do it, they can’t do it,” he said, downbeat, in the post-match interview on the official site. More frequently, though, he showed you what he was all about. When the league announced a long overdue, hugely welcome, and, sadly, largely already abandoned clampdown on things like injury feigning and clock running, with extended periods of stoppage time to be added, the BBC’s story on it included vehement objection from one manager – Gareth Ainsworth. In training that punt down the right channel for Sinclair Armstrong to run onto is worked on over and over again. Over and over and over again. Most disappointingly, even the stuff I did think Ainsworth would bring to QPR wasn’t evident. I thought, at least, we’d be good with attacking and defensive set pieces. I thought we’d see players getting down the wings at Loftus Road again, as I grew up with watching Sinclair, Sinton and Impey, and Ainsworth was part of in a later era that also included Rowlands, McLeod and Cook. I thought there would be balls into crowded penalty boxes, more like the service Lyndon Dykes enjoys so much for Scotland – ultimately Dykes scored three goals in 22 appearances for him. I thought we’d be nasty, aggressive, and difficult to play against. I thought we’d be street smart. None of this requires a lot of skill and ability. We did none of it. We’re even really bad all the stuff you’d expect a Gareth Ainsworth team to excel at. The whole Ainsworth-Dobson schtick relies on buy-in. Everybody together, team over individuals, all singing off the same hymn sheet. Taylor Richards was immediately jettisoned and, when given a chance to show himself in pre-season, “tossed off” the second game in Austria and turned in a scandalous performance at Oxford. Chris Willock, whose tracking back in some of Ainsworth’s early games and role in a Coventry goal at Loftus Road last season infuriated the manager, has also been largely cut out. QPR have struggled to score goals without him, and Ilias Chair looks bereft, but if you’re trying to renew and reset a culture in an organisation then it’s defined by the lowest standard of behaviour you’re willing to accept and both Richards and Willock have been found wanting there. Richards furthered his own glowing reputation in W12 by spending Saturday night liking and favouriting social media posts celebrating Ainsworth’s demise. Professional. In an attempt to raise standards, Ainsworth placed enormous stock, and effusive praise, in the summer arrivals of Asmir Begovic, Morgan Fox, Steve Cook and Jack Colback. Despite similarly bold claims about how he’d revolutionise the sport science department and sort out the chronic injury problems that blighted 22/23, Cook, Fox and, of course, Jake Clarke-Salter, have all largely been absent. Cook decided to start a row with fan and journalist Ian McCullough online after the Sunderland game, questioning his football knowledge – one home win in a year for this team remember. Colback has cost the team that game with a mindless sending off, and has already accumulated five bookings, three in his last three, including one for dissent on Saturday which he knew would suspend him for the crucial game at Rotherham, a game he also knew Andre Dozzell would be missing for. Colback has already been suspended for four of the 12 games he should have been available for, and will almost certainly make that six by reaching ten yellows before the amnesty in the spring. Begovic, bar notable performances at Birmingham and Middlesbrough, has looked a bit of a joke to me, costing us a game at Southampton, and kicking like an old drunk, all while promoting his bloody soccer school empire and a burgeoning media career. The QPR goalkeeper should not be appearing on Chelsea podcasts, whether we’re bottom three or not, this stuff shouldn’t be happening, I’m amazed it needs explaining to them. And these are Ainsworth’s so called “culture guardians”, who are meant to be setting the tone here. Richard Dobson painted the club culture as wholly reformed when he appeared on the Open All R’s Podcast less than a month ago, but it doesn’t look that on the field. QPR have already picked up four red cards this season, and three of them were for rank stupidity in games that were level at the time and went on to be lost. It’s looked, certainly at Leeds and Huddersfield, like the players, particularly these senior ones, are exasperated and fed up of what they were being asked to do. Steve Cook doesn’t want to end his career knocking channel balls for Sinclair Armstrong. Jack Colback can’t be doing three people’s jobs to babysit Stephen Duke-McKenna. Even the build up to the goal we did score at Huddersfield featured a bizarre exchange of passes between Kakay, Field and Colback where several times the players were openly, angrily shrugging at each other about what they were doing, or should do next.
Ultimately, it felt like the manager had been promoted above his ability level. The four games against Tomasson and Robins, in particular, were painfully inept spectacles. Blackburn are operating on restrictions similar to our own, Sammie Szmodics was a cheap pick up from Peterborough, and yet they’ve scored seven goals against Ainsworth’s team and won more games at Loftus Road this year than we have. We hoped Ainsworth’s connection with the club, allied to his work at Wycombe, would make him a perfect fit, but it’s been uneasy from the beginning. He seemed constantly torn, in tactics and interviews, between his default style and ethos of giving up possession, sitting deep, shithousing, and acting like his team are massive underdogs with the whole world against them, and opening up and trying to play a more palatable brand of football more suited to QPR’s traditions. He's even at times tried to paint fixtures like an away game at soon-to-be-relegated Wigan as some task of herculean proportions that little old QPR will be lucky to escape from alive. Of the five wins he did get, four of them were in that classic Ainsworth "possession can do one" style – only at Boro, who we caught at a nice time, could we be said to have actually played progressively and dominated the game, and even then Begovic made a succession of saves. His fawning over the veteran keeper agreeing to top up his pension with us after four years of bench sitting, and comments in supporter meetings like “there’s always one team that gets done 4-0, 5-0 on the opening day, I just hope that’s not us”, were entirely out of keeping for a club like ours, even in its present state. His preferred style is perfect for Wycombe, and unsuited to QPR. When he was appointed I said this idea that there was a “QPR way” of playing was a “sanctimonious delusion”. I take it back. I was wrong. You cannot play like this. There’s room within a “QPR way” for Ian Holloway’s 2001-2005 heroes, who were a big, physical, nasty team; and Neil Warnock’s brilliant but pragmatic 2010/11 title winners… as long as you’re winning. Mark Warburton went through numerous bad runs, arguably underachieved with the attack he had at his disposal in 2019/20, and his overspend in 2021/22 is part of the reason we’re in this state now, but, as well as his forthright intelligence and integrity in the way he dealt with and spoke to the supporters, he was largely given a pass here because you could at least see he wanted the team to play attractive, attacking football, on the floor. You cannot play like this, unless you’re winning every week. Not at this club, because the fans won’t wear it, however well loved you were for your efforts as a player. And not in this division, because it’s 2023, and if your response to that 4-0 loss at home to Blackburn a fortnight ago is “I want more intensity from the boys” then you’re so far out of your depth I doubt the RNLI would even bother mounting a launch to find you. The inheritanceOn a human level, that’s all absolutely brutal. To write, and to experience. I feel desperately, desperately sorry for Ainsworth who, in my couple of brief dealings with him over the last few months, was open, honest, generous with his time, completely aware of the scale of the problems at the club, QPR through and through and immensely proud to be our manager. He left the safest job in football to take up his dream role, and so, so wanted to turn this club around. It’s been clear throughout his time at Wycombe that he was itching for this job. He was held in tremendously high esteem by the QPR fans after his time here as a player. When Rangers played a pre-season friendly at Wycombe in 2016 it felt like a couple of thousands of R’s made the trip purely to show their appreciation to the opposition manager. To see that quickly descend into ridicule about his appearance - “greasy goth”, “Frank Gallagher” etc – has been as cruel as it was predictable. We love a bit of lazy nostalgia at this club, but we’re not afraid of eating our young either. “Nan stays in the cage until Austin signs” turns into abusing Charlie Austin’s wife on Twitter in double quick time – often from the same accounts. Apart from everything detailed above, it’s the main reason I didn’t want Ainsworth back here. It always felt like it might go this way, and I said as much in the piece when he arrived.
His failure here should always be set in the context of what he inherited. A team in need of major surgery in all areas, with no FFP headroom left to perform the operation. A team that has been losing consistently, for nearly two years, under now four different managers, bar one hot streak under Mick Beale – and even he took only one point and one goal from his final five matches. A dressing room split into warring factions depending who’d signed for who and why, with players in varying stages of phoning it in, clocking off, and sorting out their escape routes. The previous manager, Neil Critchley, said his squad’s mentality was in the bin, and what’s more when he was at Blackpool he said the rest of the Championship all knew it and talked openly about it. He said he had no desire to “be part of mediocrity” here and invited his players to come with him and improve – they promptly downed tools, not enjoying their manager publicly stating things that are clearly, obviously, palpably true. Ainsworth went to, at times, farcically extreme levels to protect them. The decision to back Leon Balogun after he’d booted off with the away end at Wigan, scheduling a high tea at the training ground with a few disgruntled supporters, rather than just making the cumbersome oaf get his arse back out on the pitch and let football do the talking against Preston, was nuts. Balogun repaid him by first playing like a complete twat in that PNE match, and later abandoning the pre-season tour of Austria to go and sign for Mick Beale at Glasgow Rangers, just as those fans had said in that meeting he would do. This pattern of Ainsworth going out to bat for his players, and them repaying him with sludge, like the pathetic red cards Colback, Dunne and Dozzell have offered him at key moments recently, has been a theme. His appearance in the interviews of the last week, when his sacking had long since become inevitable, versus how happy and proud he was when he arrived, should make you feel upset – whether you remember him fondly as a player or not, it's sad to see a guy get his dream job and it go like this. QPR is a badly run football club. The crux of the sport science and fitness team Ainsworth largely chucked under the bus in that Balogun meeting has been de-facto demoted over the summer with his appointments of Ben Williams, Dave Wates and others, but they’re all still here. There are people and players hired and signed by and for Les Ferdinand, Mark Warburton, Mick Beale and Gareth Ainsworth down there. We have staff tripping over themselves. A lot of disgruntled individuals. A lack of clear and dynamic leadership, a lack of fresh ideas, a lack of accountability. No surprise The Athletic found people happy to lend their voice to their recent deep dive as anonymous sources, something that was rife at Rangers during the bad old days of Hughes and Redknapp but had largely ceased under Les Ferdinand. There were staff in tears at Ferdinand’s farewell speech on the day the club opened its new training ground – as yet the only member of staff to carry the can for the disaster over the last 18 months, and plenty of feeling around that several others have got away scot-free and remain in position.
Without a director of football at all, you’ve now got CEO Lee Hoos making football decisions. When he first arrived he hung his hat on being a numbers and figures guy who left the football decisions to the football people, now he’s in The Athletic saying he’s comfortable doing that job with the manager and the head of recruitment while a new DOF is found (assuming we are indeed still looking for one of those). There have been chaotic situations for the manager to deal with, like his pursuit of Josh Knight. Ainsworth negotiated a £300k deal for the former Wycombe centre back, now at Peterborough, in the summer with Barry Fry and Darragh MacAnthony. Per The Athletic, the player said his farewells at London Road and was at our ground to sign contracts and do press with his agent and parents when the rug was pulled on the deal from above, “no transfer fees under any circumstances”, leaving the player angry and heading back tail between his legs, and Ainsworth embarrassed and left to apologise. The farce with the replacement of the pitch this summer left Ainsworth facing four of his first five away – at Watford, Cardiff, Southampton and Boro – with only brilliant Ipswich as a home game. Throughout it he remained steadfastly professional in public, thanking the board and Lee Hoos for their support, and maintaining we’d had a fantastic transfer window (we hadn’t, as is now patently obvious when watching the team play). He began to look so ridiculous in interviews his weekly appearances in front of the camera became tragi-comedic, but he’d rather do that than point fingers at his players or the chaotic situation around him. They all owed him a lot more in return than they've produced. Above Ainsworth and Hoos, Tony Fernandes has gone, though the club has missed all legal deadlines to update Companies House on who exactly is taking those shares – just Amit Bhatia’s vague hand wave at the fans forum that he’s picked them up along with the now omni-present but completely silent American Richard Reilly. The mid-season announcement that Matrade, of which Ruben Gnanalingam is a shareholder, has picked up the ground naming rights, hasn’t really been elaborated on beyond “delighted about the news”. Delighted because it’s freed up FFP headroom to sack the manager/strengthen the team? Delighted because we’ve actually breached FFP already and we’re trying to scramble back under it? Delighted because these guys are, as rumoured, actually part of a new ownership consortium? More uncertainty. More rumour. More conjecture. The supporters increasingly being left in the dark, fed on scraps, and expected to keep turning up week on week and forking over increased ticket prices in a cost-of-living crisis to watch absolute, unmitigated, crap on the field. All these problems are here for the next manager. All of them, and more. If you think getting rid of Ainsworth is going to cure all that ails us I fear you’re in for a disappointment. The team had collapsed under Mark Warburton, who many say they would now like back. It was losing at the start and end of Mick Beale’s reign, and again some are willing to put aside all his grotesque untruths and abysmal recruitment to welcome back out of desperation. It was losing for Critchley, and it’s lost for Ainsworth. Ainsworth could, should, have done more. It’s been, at times, embarrassing. He’s frequently spoken about not being out fought, when in fact we’ve been repeatedly out thought. I don’t think any manager keeps this team up, because it fundamentally cannot and does not score goals. It’s a year since we scored three times in a game, and we’ve only scored two goals in the same match five times in that period. That is insane. We’ve failed to score in half the games we’ve played over the last year. But you could, absolutely, make a better fist of things than Ainsworth has been doing. He’s been a disaster. As a child of that Ian Holloway revolution that’s been heartbreaking to me. I’d be astonished if there wasn’t some improvement under a new guy. Ainsworth was a problem, undoubtedly, and he had to go. But, as I keep saying, if you keep changing your manager and things don’t improve then the manager isn’t the problem. If you enjoy LoftforWords, please consider supporting the site through a subscription to our Patreon or tip us via our PayPal account loftforwords@yahoo.co.uk. Pictures — Ian Randall Photography The Twitter @loftforwords Ian Randall Photography Please report offensive, libellous or inappropriate posts by using the links provided.
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